So what happens if Photos for OS X and iOS turns out to be great? As in “insanely great?”

With the demise of Aperture as an actively developed product with a future, many serious photographers have already made their choice and switched to a competitor such as Lightroom or Capture One. I am using Lightroom; but I can’t say I love it. I never really have.

Switching makes sense after Apple neglected Aperture for so many years; leaving it to be “updated” without ever adding leading-edge features such as lens distortion correction, graduated filters, nor advanced image noise reduction. When you add that they pre-announced Photos, but said almost nothing about what its capabilities would be nor what market it would serve, no wonder there was a rush for the doors.

If you’d like to start a online firestorm, opening a topic on the Luminous Landscape Lightroom forum will work. My move from Aperture to Lightroom offered the occasion for me to review and potentially revise my photo storage organization. So I started a thread there to see how others using Lightroom organized their libraries.

Before all the arguing started, I did get some useful input. The original “bible” for digital asset management (DAM) is Peter Krogh’s excellent The DAM Book; the latest version focuses specifically on Lightroom 5. I read that and felt comfortable with the concepts, but wasn’t sure I liked the strictly date-based “storage layer.”

My system in Aperture was created with projects grouped in folders by location. While there were some exceptions, the bulk of my photos were in this folder-by-location hierarchy. So pictures taken while I was in downtown Savannah, Georgia ended up in the project Georgia > Savannah > Downtown (in Aperture, all images are in a project)

I’m getting more comfortable working within Capture One Pro (C1, for short), but I still did a little work trying to see if I could continue to use Aperture for its excellent DAM features, but use C1 for adjustments. I don’t think I’m going to go that route, but I wanted to document what I learned. If not for anyone else, then for me.

There’s a plug-in for Aperture called Catapult that will allow Aperture to export an unconverted RAW file to a “drop folder” and then import edits made in another program saved to a “pick up folder.” It will even stack the edited version with the original in Aperture. And it’s easy.

You won’t be able to work with C1’s catalogs with this round-trip method, it must use sessions. And it gets a little messy to keep C1’s edits non-destructive as the C1 session gradually fills with images that have been round-tripped from Aperture. But it works.

Aperture has been my go-to photo tool since it first came out. I love everything about how it handles my pictures from the way its library function work, through its edit anywhere correction abilities and on to output whether it be prints, photo books or Facebook.

My occasional gripes are around its slow progress in adding photo correction tools such as lens correction and advanced noise reduction. Sadly, we know why that is now; Apple announced yesterday that development on Aperture has ceased. We’ll see an update for compatibility with this fall’s OS X Yosemite and presumably some new camera support. I’d guess the camera support will come mostly because Aperture uses OS X’s raw decoding, and Apple will need to keep up with that regardless, not because of any attention spent on Aperture.

The new hotness in early 2015 with be Photos, a whole new application that will replace iPhoto. Aperture libraries will have a way to transition to Photos, but we can’t tell yet whether it will replace Aperture. Will Photos be a professional tool or will the pros need to go somewhere else? This is a place that Apple’s secrecy does not serve its users well.